Shakespeare and Indian Cinema – Call For Papers

Shakespeare and Indian Cinema
London
27-30 April, 2016

Screenings with Q&A: Vishal Bhardwaj’s trilogy Maqbool, Omkara, Haider in collaboration with the British Film Institute – 29-30 April

Keynote Panel: Scriptwriters in discussion

  • Abbas Tyrewala (Maqbool, 2004)
  • Robin Bhatt and Abhishek Chaubey (Omkara, 2006)
  • Basharat Peer (Haider, 2014)

Indian Shakespeare on stage has garnered the increasing attention of academics both Western and Eastern, yet local and regional screen versions continue to be largely overlooked within the scope of Shakespeare on film. It has been a decade since the publication of India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation and Performance (2005), where Poonam Trivedi observes that despite the seven hundred million speakers of different Indian languages worldwide, Shakespeare’s impact on the theatre and films in these languages has yet to be accorded the critical attention it merits.

In 2014, we hosted a one-day conference in London to discuss the relationship between Shakespeare and Hindi cinema/ Bollywood, the world’s largest cinema industry. In 2016, we seek to widen this discussion to include the relationship between Shakespeare and Indian cinema, bringing together researchers and practitioners to establish the state of current scholarship in this vibrant, underexamined field.

We invite proposals for 20 minute papers (and panels), posters and creative approaches, from scholars of all disciplines including film studies, postcolonial studies, Shakespeare studies and translation studies. These could be on any aspect of Shakespeare and Indian cinema, especially regional cinemas and overlooked aspects of Shakespeare in Bollywood.

Topics could include:

  • prehistories
  • Indian film translations/adaptations/appropriations of Shakespeare’s works
  • practitioners’/directors’/writers’/others’ experiences
  • intertextual adaptations/intermedial crossovers
  • Shakespeare in Indian film festivals
  • documentaries on any aspect of Shakespeare in India/Indian Shakespeares
  • screenplays
  • economics global and local
  • comparisons of Shakespeare in Indian cinema to Shakespearean adaptations in other countries
  • Shakespeare in Indian cinema and regional audience reception
  • beyond Parsi theatre: Indian Shakespeare cinema and other indigenous performance traditions
  • Shakespeare and South-Asian diaspora films
  • challenges of researching Shakespeare and Indian cinema
  • challenges to and importance of building an archive
  • Shakespeare and socio-political campaigns in Indian cinema
  • gendering Shakespeare in Indian cinema
  • artwork and promotional material: posters, flybills, film trailers, coffee table books, music releases

Abstracts of 300 words and/or panel proposals (plus a 50 word bio) should be sent to shakespeareandbollywood@rhul.ac.uk by 25 November, 2015.

Responses will be made by 20 December 2015.